Sydney Stories

Six short stories, originally published in "Quadrant" magazine, Australia: there's more to Sydney than just a pretty harbour; there's more to Australia than Kangaroos. Australia is a distant planet. More

Six short stories, originally published in "Quadrant" magazine, Australia: Starving Africans materialise in the city centre - what is to be done with them?A slow but lethal sentence.The haunting of a group of head-hunters.The curious marriage of a dull preacher.A ludicrous product launch in a city hotel, and two odd attendees. A man who can't see trees.

Andrew McBurnie was born in Hull, UK, and emigrated with his family to Australia in 1966. He lives in Sydney.

"Starship Walker" grew out of my desire for a mode of interstellar travel which seems more believable to me than warp drives, stargates or any other of the other current SF means of bypassing the dismal fact that the enormous distances between the stars are very unlikely to be crossed by human beings. I also wanted to include as part of the story some more recent discoveries of astronomy, particularly the fact that our home system exists in an enormous, safe bubble inside the galactic clouds, from which it will depart in a few million more years into a much more hostile environment. Much SF seems oblivious to this.

"Fear Week" is about the city where I grew up, Hull, in the Yorkshire East Riding. It was the second most bombed city after London, but was always kept secret during the war. Hull was only referred to as "a north-eastern city". This is not widely known. As children, we were accustomed to bombed-out ruins: in the way of children, we thought it was normal. The early sixties was an era when all young people knew that at any moment, their lives might be ended by a nuclear war, a threat that was just called "The Bomb". The phrase, "press the button", was widely used to mean the end of the world. The Cuban missile crisis was very nearly it. It's surprising that many people nowadays don't know how close we came.